Resistance, Zines, and Girls' Poetry

Kristen Schilt’s article “I’ll Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath” posits that girl produced zines allow girls to adopt a type of “c/overt resistance” in which they are able to overtly express negative emotions such as anger while still retaining anonymity. Thus, zine authoring provides girls with an active voice where their emotions surrounding issues of gender, sexuality, sexism, sexual abuse, and more are validated by a community of female peers. In the world of zine authoring girls don’t have to feel shame or risk sanctions for speaking out about issues of sexual abuse and other justified emotions that are experienced by girls as they enter adolescence and young adulthood.

I am however, not quite sure what to make of girl produced webzines. I honestly haven’t spent anytime searching for or looking for webzine communities to belong to. So it’s pretty much a foreign world to me. In trying to do a search for girl produced webzines—nothing really came up worth analyzing. The webzines I found mostly seemed unavailable to me (a lot were hosted by myspace and Facebook and therefore you had to be a friend to read the zine), others were contained in a blog but were not well maintained and didn’t have anyone commenting on the posts which meant there really wasn’t a community for those “zines”, and still others were obviously written by adults. I don’t think I could do this question justice without spending some serious time analyzing clearly girl produced webzines.

As far as non-web produced girl zines go—Schilt does a great job analyzing—I think it was—27 girl produced zines by teen girls under the age of 18. Her analysis really provides a window into the world of zine authoring and how zines provide a "safe space" for girls to write about what matters most to them, their anger, and to write for an audience of their peers who share many of the same emotions and experiences as the writer. I actually wonder if webzines still allow for this type of authentic community and anonymity?  I see that many webzines are hosted on Facebook, myspace, and other websites that (I believe) requires you to enter in your personal information to join. Keeping anonymity on such sites seems to defeat the purpose of having these sites in the first place, as such sites are designed to help you find friends and community through the act of identifying yourself by your name, gender, age, location, level of education, interests, and so on. I guess my question is then—can a girl produced webzine provide the type of community that Schilt discusses in her article if we take out girls’ anonymity as authors? Does the act of making identity clearly visible change what girls are willingly to write about in their zines and in turn change what zines do for girls? I think it does, but I’m curious what you think.

I think girl produced poetry books are another important form of resistance that allows girls a form of “c/overt resistance”. Thus, poetry provides a forum for teen and tween girls to express emotions and topics concerning sexuality, gender inequality, or sexual abuse they might otherwise be afraid to express overtly. Poetry can further be printed in a zine and distributed anonymously if the author wishes. As a teen girl, I used poetry as a means to express the emotions I was afraid to voice. Schilt’s article really resonated with me on a personal level. My poetry book acted like a zine in that it provided me a safe space to talk about my emotions, desires, sexuality, and political views that I couldn’t voice in my household. However, as a young teen I rarely shared my poems with anyone, which shows that I adopted a more covert type of resistance. But as I grew older I began to share some of my poems with close female friends and even had one poem published. Here I began to take on more of a c/overt type of resistance.

Finally, I see a lot of the work the girls were doing at the camp seemed to fit within an overt type of resistance. Therefore, the girls produced videos and sound files that actively resisted normative gender roles, e.g. the rewriting of “Little Red Riding Hood” that I discussed in yesterday’s post. Here we see that girls can resist normative girlhood by rewriting cultural scripts and by becoming cultural producers themselves. Rewriting the lyrics, visual cues, and gender performances of various popular culture texts are other important way girls can begin to employ an overt resistance. Further, girls can produce their own webpages and form discourse communities that counter gender stereotypes and normative performances of gender.